Not Your Grandfather's Southern Baptist

A denomination founded in a pre-Civil War schism over slavery is poised to elect its first black president.

By

Naomi Schaefer Riley

March 2, 2012

New Orleans

For months, the leadership of the Southern Baptist Convention has been debating whether to drop the word "Southern" from its name. But last week, citing the hassle and expense, leaders abandoned this attempt to scrub the racial overtones from the convention's image. As it turns out, the SBC is poised to do something much more significant.

Meet the Rev. Fred Luter Jr., pastor of New Orleans's 4,500-member Franklin Avenue Baptist Church—and the man who this spring will likely become the first black president of the Southern Baptist Convention. He announced last month that he was putting himself in the running, and the convention's movers and shakers seem almost unanimous in their support.

The SBC was born in 1845 after Baptists from the Northern states refused to appoint slaveholders to missionary posts, and the Southern states decided to break off. Like many Protestant denominations in America that split over the issue of slavery, the Baptists remained separate long after the Civil War. Though the leadership of the SBC supported an end to segregation even before Brown v. Board of Education (1954), the denomination's churches in many cases remained hotbeds of racial animus.

It wasn't until 1995 that the SBC issued a resolution on racial reconciliation. As Richard Land of the convention's Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission explains, "Before that, what we had never done was accept responsibility, apologize and ask for forgiveness." Since then, the SBC's black membership has grown from about 337,000 to one million.

Mr. Luter, 55, came to Franklin Avenue Baptist Church 30 years ago from the Lower 9th Ward of New Orleans, where, after an almost fatal motorcycle accident, he had found God and a calling as a street preacher. (It's why he preaches fast, he explains: "You have to when you're trying to reach people just moving by.")

When he arrived at Franklin Avenue, the black congregation had only 50 members. It had been a member of the SBC since its inception in the 1940s as a white church. When the white people fled the neighborhood in the 1970s, black congregants filled the pews and never changed the church's affiliation.

As Mr. Luter's church began to grow—to a high point of about 8,000 members before Hurricane Katrina—he was invited to other churches to preach. Sometimes congregants were hostile. In the 1990s, one preacher had to rescind his invitation to Mr. Luter because the deacons told him a black preacher would come to their church "over our dead bodies." A little more than a decade later, Mr. Luter was elected vice president of the convention.

Why did he remain part of the denomination all these years? In addition to his theological agreement with the convention, he says he is also deeply appreciative of the "church's support of foreign missions and its commitment to disaster relief."

He had plenty of first-hand experience with the latter after Katrina. Franklin Avenue took in nine feet of water during the storm. His parishioners, who mostly live in the Gentilly neighborhood, saw their homes destroyed. About half of his congregation left the city, and the church now has satellites in Baton Rouge and Houston.

Last Sunday, Mr. Luter preached about what he called "focused faith." In Matthew 14, when Jesus commands Peter to walk on water, the disciple initially does so successfully. But Peter begins to sink when he starts to notice the wind blowing around him. Mr. Luter advises his congregation to ignore those winds, to keep "focused on Jesus" and "not get bogged down by circumstance." The winds are certainly blowing around Mr. Luter's congregants, many of whom are still displaced from their homes, unemployed, and living in neighborhoods with some of the highest crime rates in the country.

He was boisterous and funny during the sermon and he had the congregation, which had filled the pews starting at 7:30 a.m., on its feet. With each point driven home, he would smile widely and then take a short victory lap around the pulpit. His preaching, his ministry, and the 50-member strong gospel choir make it the largest church in the city. They've also managed to produce something almost unheard of in any American house of worship—a balanced number of women and men. (A 2008 Pew survey shows the average ratio was about 54-46 women to men, but at black churches it's closer to 60-40.)

Mr. Luter says he does not preach much about politics, though he does inveigh regularly against abortion and gay marriage. How his voice will play in national politics is an interesting question.

It seems unlikely that he'll be heeding President Obama's recent call to black church leaders to organize on his behalf. And the SBC has been clear in its opposition to what it sees as the president's recent infringements on religious liberty. In a year when liberals will be leveling the charge of racism against opponents of the president's policies, we can look forward to seeing their reaction to Fred Luter Jr.

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